“I’ve decided to build a new settlement here,” she said at the lake. “And this hill overlooking the shore will be the center of it. It’s a little far from the current village, but it’s an ideal location to defend, and it will be close to the village as well as the bull-kin colony. My hope is that someday this location will be an administrative center for the territory. I want you to take charge of some people and build a castle here—as well as an attendant settlement.”
“You want to build a castle? On this hill?”
“That’s right. Look how much of the land you can see from up here. We’ve managed to carve a village out of Apegut Forest, but it’s nothing more than a remote outpost on the outermost frontier as far as the kingdom is concerned. That’s how they see it. As for how I see it, we’re on the edge of vast, unclaimed tracts of land.”
Alexandricia was wearing her usual outfit that sort of reminded me of a dress, but today she was also clad in her knight’s attire. She stood atop the low rise of the hill and gazed out over the lake and the broad expanse of Apegut Forest.
She was right—the forest was vast. The lay of the forest known to the villagers only extended about half a day’s walk from the village or one of the smaller settlements. Only the hunters knew anything of the geography beyond. And nearly half of the hunters had died in the fight against the wyvern, so veterans like Wak’wakgoro and Nishka were the only ones with any detailed knowledge of the area.
The village chief wanted to change that. That was why the adventurers we had brought back from town were currently employed in making those maps.
“Since our village is just an outpost, up ’til now we’ve grown by letting people build houses more or less wherever they wanted.” The village chief turned her eyes down to the people gathered below us. “That changes now. I intend to build a settlement here beside the lake so that we can develop into a town in permanent control of this area.”
“I see. So that’s the objective?”
“That’s right. You saw what Bulka was like. And you must have noticed something when you compared it to my village. Didn’t you?”
“Our buildings look piss-poor compared to them.”
“It hurts to hear it put so bluntly, but yes, that’s exactly what I’m referring to.” Alexandricia planted a hand on her hip and laughed musically.
The town of Bulka featured neat avenues of cobblestone streets and stone houses. Meanwhile, the houses in our outpost village consisted of mud walls piled around a central wooden column and capped with a thatched roof. From the outside, they looked like triangular huts.
They were like the crude houses widely used during the settlement of Hokkaido in the late 1800s, the ones called “prayer huts”—not because they were churches or anything, but because when viewed from the side, they looked like hands steepled in prayer.
But in some ways, the huts in the village were completely different from the “prayer huts” of Hokkaido’s settlement period. Back on Earth, the prayer huts were a temporary solution thrown together in desperation until the settlement stabilized and they could begin harvesting crops. In this world, the bedraggled huts were constructed when the settlement was first established, and they continued to be built to this day. They were certainly larger than the huts I’d visited on field trips or whatever, and the ones in my world didn’t have mud walls, but those weren’t huge differences.
“We never knew if our work to reclaim the land and establish our settlement would fail, so we never cultivated the ambition to build sturdier houses until now,” Alexandricia explained.
I nodded. “And when the number of residents increases, you’ll need to provide permanent housing anyway. And a castle to keep it all defensible.”
She nodded in turn. “I am the governor of this region, and I must protect my people. It’s not enough to simply protect my own village. I need a fortification that can accommodate everyone from the surrounding settlements in case of emergency.”
“I understand. In which case, the houses should all be surrounded by the castle walls…” I touched a hand to my chin and thought the problem over. I watched as some goblins hauled timber freshly cut from the forest to the planned construction site. There were fewer than fifty people working below, but that was all we could spare right now.
“There’s a strict difference between a town and a village, Shooter. Do you know what it is?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“The laws of the kingdom define a town as having city walls. There are about one thousand people in our village, which is relatively large for such a settlement, but we’re still considered a village, even though there are several towns around Bulka with fewer people. Once they have city walls, they have the privilege of becoming a proper town.”
“So we need walls. Does that mean we’re going to build those later on?”
“No. Towns and villages pay different amounts of tax to the king. In order to prosper from this expansion, we need to remain a ‘village’ as long as possible. Of course, we won’t be able to bend the rules forever,” the village chief said. So, she intended to bring the village up to the level of a town but keep it categorized as a village as long as possible for the sweet tax break. “However, the powers on our borders consider this unclaimed land. Just as the bull-kin had their eyes on it, so do many others.”
“Which means we do need ramparts, or something similar.”
“Precisely.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am. What’s the difference between a castle wall and a city wall? I mean, couldn’t a stone wall qualify as either a castle or a city wall?”